

David Abel
612 posts

@dabelcs
Scientist @GoogleDeepMind and Fellow @EdinburghUni | RL, philosophy, agency, foundations | office hours: https://t.co/XrrHAXXHi5













Thrilled to announce I'll start in 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @UAlberta + @AmiiThinks Fellow!! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural and artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (talk at @CogInterp & organising @DataOnBrainMind)







Thrilled to share our new #NeurIPS2025 paper done at @GoogleDeepMind, Plasticity as the Mirror of Empowerment We prove every agent faces a trade-off between its capacity to adapt (plasticity) and its capacity to steer (empowerment) Paper: david-abel.github.io/plasticity.pdf 🧵🧵🧵👇

At NeurIPS and interested in continual learning? Stop by our spotlight poster this Friday @ 11am (#508). Our work provides a computational approach to the big world hypothesis through embedded agents. Feel free to reach out if you want to meet up while in San Diego!






Thrilled to share our new #NeurIPS2025 paper done at @GoogleDeepMind, Plasticity as the Mirror of Empowerment We prove every agent faces a trade-off between its capacity to adapt (plasticity) and its capacity to steer (empowerment) Paper: david-abel.github.io/plasticity.pdf 🧵🧵🧵👇



📜🤖 Can a shared multi-agent RL policy support both specialised & homogeneous team behaviours -- without changing the learning objective, requiring preset diversity levels or sequential updates? Our preprint “HyperMARL: Adaptive Hypernetworks for Multi-Agent RL” explores this!